After reading the opinion piece "Providing incentives to rehab old shopping centers"
in the Newnan-Times Herald, I realized similar conversations are happening in Carrollton, Douglasville, Newnan, and throughout the West Georgia region. State-wide. And probably throughout the country. Every community has commercial corridors that have seen better days. Similar stories exist. The anchor tenants, perhaps the tenants that the buildings were built for in the first place, have left....long ago. Over the term of their 10, 15, 20-year lease agreement, changes may have occurred in their industry, their business structure, or maybe they just wanted a new building somewhere else. Regardless of what change occurred, the business has left but the building remains.
For instance, First Tuesday Mall in Carrollton, once a beacon of retail activity on the Bankhead corridor, is a shell of its former self. Oftentimes the question comes up, "Why doesn't the owner do something about that building/strip mall/shopping center?" Has the owner done something wrong to lead to this? What's the pathway forward?
I think it's fair to recognize that the prevalence of this pattern across communities in this country points to the fact that are there are some broader economic processes at work. The silver lining of this broad phenomenon is that we can learn from one other and share practices that work and ones that fail miserably. We can participate in a broader conversation about how we want our built environment to influence and contribute to our communities.
How did we get here in the first place?
As buildings and retail corridors age without new investment, they develop what is referred to as functional obsolescence: a reduction in the usefulness or desirability of an object because of an outdated design feature, usually one that cannot be easily changed. Many things in our lives become obsolescent (for example older technology like cathode ray TVs). Usually these things are movable objects that can be thrown away, recycled, reused in a different market, or re-purposed. With buildings, especially large shopping centers, its more challenging because of their scale and permanence. The building was built for a specific anchor tenant. Buildings are difficult to relocate. Options that exist for addressing obsolescence in the built environment:
Recycling: Finding a new tenant with a need for a similar space can be difficult. Either the product sits vacant or gets discounted to the point where someone makes it work. Examples on the Bankhead corridor are Robinson Salvage in the former Lowe's building and Robinson Salvage: Overstock Warehouse in the former KMart building.
Reuse in or relocation to a different market: Shopping centers can't be moved. This is not an option in this story.
Repurposing: In the built environment context, this requires significant investment in remodeling. At First Tuesday Mall on Bankhead, we've seen a physical therapy business repurpose a movie theater.
Ultimately however, the location...the land....once considered a prime location for top-tier businesses, now houses businesses that are either living with a space that fits them poorly at a steep discount. Or they are adapting a space but still most likely not bringing the same value that the original tenant brought to the overall health of the location as a whole. This process, in the context of large, older strip malls and shopping centers, has led to a significant loss in value, attractiveness, economic traffic, and overall community benefit that these locations once provided. For the neighboring small businesses that share the same retail corridor, this precipitous decline has created conditions of economic obsolescence: when the value of a property decreases due to external factors in the neighborhood or immediate are.
The retail center, having once had a positive out-sized, anchoring effect for neighboring parcels, now have an out-sized negative effect for the whole corridor because of the commercial void and visual eyesore they have become.
New Retail/commercial developers (prototypical anchor tenants), finding it cheaper to buy new land than to buy developed land with obsolescent buildings, develop further down corridors like 166 and highway 27 in Carrollton. This leaves corridors like sections of Bankhead Highway in situations where they repel new, quality investment.
Note: This in no way an expression of negative views towards the business tenants that find a way to reuse or repurpose space in old shopping centers. In fact, they are a critical part of the process.So what options do we have? Where do we go from here? In the coming weeks, this blog will explore engagement opportunities for community members, public policy tools, and business opportunities that exist in regards to the future of old shopping centers and strip malls. I welcome input and feedback at ahinman@visionwestgeorgia.com.